I was fascinated with this article at TechCrunch about IBM's Watson. I have not been following the recent achievements by IBM supper computer statues recently. Jeopardy champions Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings are locked in an epic battle with Watson--an IBM supercomputer--for the fate of humanity and the future of planet Earth. OK, they're actually only battling over trivia game show bragging rights, but what does it say about the future of humanity if Watson wins? It gives a whole new meaning to "final Jeopardy.

For the last three years, scientists at IBM have been developing what they expect will be the world’s most advanced “question answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution — “natural language,” as computer scientists call it — and respond with a precise, factual answer. In other words, it must do more than what search engines like Google and Bing do, which is merely point to a document where you might find the answer.

A few years ago I registered Askdroid as a domain name with this kind of ideas in mind. obviously I don’t have research and development team that IBM has, so I could not do much with it except wait so the API in WolframAlpha was available so I could build something web based connecting to AolframAlpha API - But the API has only come just now out. SO maybe we would now create a module to talk to their API.

However, if you test Wolfram you will notice it is no Google in terms of speed. Having said that it is very good in giving you back very clean answers even though it is a little slow.

Technologists have long regarded this sort of artificial intelligence as a holy grail, because it would allow machines to converse more naturally with people, letting us ask questions instead of typing keywords. Software firms and university scientists have produced question-answering systems for years, but these have mostly been limited to simply phrased questions. Nobody ever tackled “Jeopardy!” because experts assumed that even for the latest artificial intelligence techniques, the game was simply too difficult: the clues are too puzzling and allusive, and the large number of trivia is too much to handle.

IBM Claims that Watson is now advanced enough to have cracked the task — and aims to prove as much on national TV. The producers of “Jeopardy!” have agreed to pit Watson against some of the game’s best former players. To test Watson’s capabilities against actual humans, I.B.M.’s scientists began holding live matches last winter. They mocked up a conference room to resemble the actual “Jeopardy!” set, including buzzers and stations for the human contestants, brought in former contestants from the show and even hired a host for the occasion: Todd Alan Crain, who plays a newscaster on the satirical Onion News Network.

Tech Crunch quoted: – Vernor Vinge

“We will soon create intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the centre of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding.“

In Round 9: Jeopardy IBM's supercomputer Watson prepares to face off against Jeopardy champions tonight, we count the ways that humans can still out-think our computational creations—for now. In Tech Crunch article, they also quote very funny Taiwanese animators at NMA - with a video below. In the mean time I am sure the world is waiting in anticipation for the result of the pending game.

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